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New plugin: Support Tickets

Support Tickets is a new WordPress plugin I’ve created which allows you to create and manage a simple support ticket system or helpdesk system on your WordPress. If you are offering a support service and are looking for a simple tool to help you with that, Support Tickets is an excellent choice. I’m using this for my customization service for Contact Form 7, as well.

I’ve developed the Support Tickets plugin based on my Contact Form 7 plugin, so there are similarities. If you are familiar with Contact Form 7, you’ll be comfortable with Support Tickets very soon.

Usage

After you have installed and activated the plugin, you’ll see a new “Support” menu added on the left side of the menu bar of the WordPress administration panel. The “Support” menu contains “Forms” and “Tickets” sub menus.

First, you need to create a form through which users can open tickets. To create a form, open “Support” > “Forms” menu. You’ll see an editing interface much like Contact Form 7. Actually, you can edit a form in this plugin just as you do in Contact Form 7. You can use the “tag generator,” too. You can add as many different kinds of input fields as you like, but remember that the default fields (“email,” “first-name,” “last-name,” “subject” and “message”) are a must, so do not remove them.

You’ll find a “Form Page” drop-down menu on the form edit page. With this setting, you can select a page which includes the form inside its page content. You can only put a form into page content. Putting forms into other places, i.e., posts, widgets or templates, is not supported.

After this step, you should see the form on the page you’ve selected. Now users can open their tickets through this form. When a new ticket is created, notification mails will be sent to the user who opened the ticket and the administrator (you). The notification shows you the URL of the ticket. A ticket URL includes a unique random “access key,” and only those who know the access key are allowed to access the ticket page.

On the ticket page, you can write any messages. You can also close or delete a ticket on the “Support” > “Tickets” menu. You can search for other tickets as well.

Multilingual Support

You will have the ability to make a “multilingual support ticket system” with this plugin. It is true — this plugin allows you to write messages in your language and ask a professional translator to translate your message to another user’s language. Actually, I’m using this feature for the Japanese to English translations in my support service. This feature utilize the WPML plugin, so you need to install the plugin beforehand. I’ll write about this feature in detail on another post.